Russia on Monday addressed divorce rumors regarding Bashar al-Assad and his spouse, Asma al-Assad, denying them outright. “No, they don’t correspond to actuality,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on a convention name concerning the media studies out of Turkey alleging the Assads’ break up, per Reuters. Peskov additionally stated that studies that the ex-Syrian dictator was pressured to remain in Moscow, and {that a} freeze had been positioned on his belongings, had been equally not correct.
Meanwhile, the British prime minister’s workplace stated it had positioned “very powerful” sanctions on the Assad household, per the Telegraph. It did not verify, nonetheless, that these sanctions would come with stopping 49-year-old Asma al-Assad—who was born within the UK to Syrian mother and father and holds twin citizenship—from coming into Britain if she selected to go there. Earlier this month, UK Foreign Minister David Lammy advised Parliament that she was “not welcome” of their nation, and that “I’ll do every little thing I can in my energy to make sure that none of that household discover a place within the UK.”
Asma al-Assad had her belongings frozen within the UK in 2012. The BBC notes that the previous first woman has been “a topic of curiosity in Western media” for the reason that Assads married in 2000. A 2011 Vogue profile describing her as a “rose within the desert” was finally yanked from the journal’s web site as her husband’s regime violently cracked down on protesters in Syria’s civil conflict. She revealed she’d been handled for breast most cancers in 2018, and in May it was introduced that she had leukemia and would “quickly withdraw” from public engagements to bear remedy. (More Bashar al-Assad tales.)